Another Special Election; this is not a recording, click, a recording, click

2018 is turning out to be an anomaly when it comes to the KPA Board and Executive Committee.

When Kim Woods was elected Vice President at the Winter Convention, the Bylaws required we have a Special Election to fill her elected Board seat for District 13. We started the nomination process and before the letters could be mailed, Larry Hensley, who had just taken over as Treasurer, announced he was leaving the Danville Advocate Messenger to return to Indiana.

So that precipitated a Special Election to fill his Board seat in District 14. Plus we needed to elect a Treasurer. The latter can be handled from the Board without an election by the membership.

At the same time, Kim Woods announced she was leaving the Lexington Herald-Leader/HL Media as VP for advertising, so that meant a Special Election was needed to fill the Vice Presidency.

Are you keeping count so far?

The process to fill a Vice President spot is a little different from the others. We have to determine who is eligible. Using the Bylaws, again, any person who has ever served or is serving as an elected director, and any person who has served three consecutive years as a State At-Large Board member is eligible. We notified those 20 or so individuals that if interested, they were eligible for be nominated, even if a self-nomination.

As I’ve written about in On Second Thought, we had four people nominated, all four current elected Board members.

Each full member newspaper gets one vote and that’s done by the publisher or general manager. So individual letters were mailed to the 145 newspapers eligible, explaining the vote process, listing the names of the four — Dennis Brown, Regina Catlett, Jeff Jobe and Jeff Moreland — who had been nominated as VP.

We gave members about 10 days to mark their vote on the letter and return it to KPA. Friday, March 2, was the voting deadline but we kept it open until this past Monday so that any ballots mailed by March 2 would be counted.

We had 100 newspapers cast a ballot for Vice President and you can see elsewhere in this week’s On Second Thought that Jeff Jobe was elected Vice President in a good, close race.

So here we go again. Jeff is an elected Board member, as were all four nominated, and his election as Vice President means we have to have a Special Election in District 4 to fill his unexpired term. That is now in process as letters seeking nominations have been mailed to all full member newspapers (the publisher or general manager) in Allen, Barren, Butler, Edmonson, Hart, Logan, Metcalfe, Monroe, Simpson and Warren counties. If we get more than one person nominated to fill the unexpired term (it expires in January, 2020) then we’ll send a ballot to each publisher/general manager to determine who will represent those counties for the next 22 or so months.

Because of the Bylaws on the Vice President moving up, every year we have one Special Election to fill that person’s Board seat.

Here we are just two months removed from the KPA Winter Convention, the official start to KPA’s year, and we’re now at five Special Elections, including the Executive Committee’s action to fill the 2018 KPA Treasurer position with Regina Catlett.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, or so they say. Once the District 4 election is finished, we’ll then give you a brand new list of who’s where on the KPA Executive Committee and Board of Directors.

And, knocking on the wooden desk, hope that is the last of the Special Elections for 2018.